Peace and Love and Noticing the Details

2012-01-24T16:09:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I start paying attention to some art somebody created, writing, painting, song, for example. and then I want to stop paying attention to it forever. Sometimes I do. Shut the book, walk away from the painting, turn off the song.

This avoidance happens when the art is saying something true about reality that I don't want to be with, and saying it skillfully.

Even if I do stay away forever, the skill and force that made me run away have taught me a little more about reality, like it or not.

Better is what happens sometimes, I go back, take it slow, learn me. The creator and I live the same place, and it's best for me to know about that place.

It's not like I'm on a rocky planet that is life-possible distant from a faraway star. I'm here.

2012-01-24T16:05:00.000-08:00

Would like to look at it from all angles.

Can't. Not enough time.

If not all, many angles should be looked at. Good to set aside a time to look at angles I'm sure don't matter.

Looking at angles that I can't imagine existing is good, but I need help getting there from luck or accident, preferably gentle accident.

2012-01-24T16:04:00.001-08:00

Walking around outside, I wanted to have a shadow. I wanted the sun.

2012-01-18T15:31:00.001-08:00

"We are turning, turning, turning," said the woman on the bus who knew how to talk to the child with her. With people relatively new to the whole scene, it's helpful to notice what they are noticing and talk about it.

"Turning, turning, turning," at the next corner.

When they got off the bus, the child turned around and around in one place, rotating on the rotating planet she'd learning to interact with.

2012-01-17T16:37:00.000-08:00

Late Sunday, windy, chilly--most of the farmer's market sellers had packed up and headed home.

But a woman coming up out of the BART station with a child said, "Oh, the peanuts are still open! Let's get some!" and she and the child ran across the plaza.

2012-01-17T16:27:00.000-08:00

I knew a guy who when he was up for the draft for World War II showed up at the draft place and didn't want to go. He didn't say much or do anything untoward. He was just there and he really didn't want to go.

They didn't want him around, and gave him some kind of exemption, and he didn't go. I bet practice in being clear and firm inside yourself about your own truth would help with that.

I knew a guy who during the Vietnam draft went to the draft place and when they asked for a urine sample, he drank his urine. They called him crazy and let him go. He said to get to the point where he did that, he did get crazy some. He is a high-energy, intense guy always.

I knew a guy who enlisted in the Navy after Vietnam because he wanted, he told me, "to get into the living quarters of community leaders in poor countries at night and slit their throats." I don't think that's how he put it at the time to himself.

So he enlisted and tested high and found that kind of work isn't what the Navy wants it's smartest to do.

He was in a computer room all the time on a ship. He had a weird Navy shift so his off time moved around the day because the shifts weren't designed to match twenty-four hours.

He didn't like it, any of it.

If being a Navy commando, he would have been out there in the general air and the general day and night and doing things he expected to involve courage and physical stealthiness smarts. The computer jig on a ship wasn't it.

He want to work room of the officer above him and said what he'd enlisted for and said he wanted out. He isn't burly, but he is really tall. He sat in the officer's room and really really wanted to be out of the Navy.

They let him out within a few days.

Again, previous strength of will seems indicated.

2012-01-15T15:06:00.000-08:00

I like San Francisco about as much as I don't like noir films. Which is to say, lots.

On Friday, January 20, 2012, at the Castro Theatre as part of the Noir City film festival, two noir movies will be screened which show in detail what some of San Francisco looked like in the middle of the twentieth century.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do about that, if anything.

"Dark Passage" (1947) has Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, whom I like. "The House on Telegraph Hill" (1950) has what the festival blurb calls a classic "woman in peril" plot. I don't like those.

Hmm. . .

More information at noircity.com

2012-01-14T15:14:00.001-08:00

The show at the Club Six on Friday the 13th, 2012, featured, says the poster, "King Hopeton plus Clear Conscience, Counter Culture, and Highest Intention," a good fit for dancing into the three-day weekend of our only legal holiday to honor a social change activist.

2012-01-14T15:12:00.000-08:00

You're the kind of person who could make everything better by giving in to being yourself.

2012-01-13T15:38:00.000-08:00

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday is becoming a day to do volunteering.

The Montgomery bus boycott started without being particularly led by the ministers, but they were the leaders of the community, and they and others expected them to assume leadership.

Women were important in starting the boycott impulse before the meeting because white bus drivers routinely screamed at black women to move who were sitting in what the drivers thought was the wrong place. It wasn't a matter of asking in a normal voice.

On the evening of the day Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move when screamed at, the meeting of black ministers and other black leaders about how to lead the already happening event boycott in the church King was minister of. This meant that though other people at the meeting of about seventy people could and did slip out, he had to stay to the end.

He was a new guy in town, and this appealed to some of the others as a reason for him to lead, so there he still was and he was new. The task was tough and not utterly without danger.

So, he became the miniter who was leader of the boycott. Various subsidiary reasons for that could be perceived by King and other thinking like him as how God worked out God's will on this occasion. That isn't necessarily wrong. God is good at working with conditions like that, especially among people who are all the time invoking God, and or the greater good, in their lives.

In the day leading up the the meeting, flyer handout was going on, to encourage the leaders in their meeting that night to continue the boycott, make strong demands, to not knuckle under.

No Xerox machines then, so having a way to make copies was power not everyone had. Jo Ann Robinson, a woman who had been screamed at by a bus driver and who was a political activist, had a friend who had access to a mimeograph machine as part of her job at Alabama State. A mimeograph a copy maker where you had to make a special kind of original for it to work. Jo Ann Robinson made a thousands of copies of a flyer to lead to the leaders, and made sure they got around.

That kind of pressure and the been around guys sort of said, yes and how about the new guys leads, and the new guy said yes to the situation, and to God.

--information from "Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference" by David Garrow

2012-01-13T15:20:00.001-08:00

Twenty twelve twice has the "tw" sound which is fun to say and which will be said more often in 2012 than some other times.

2012-01-12T10:36:00.000-08:00

Subway seems to be going the path of lots of locations. They've opened a Subway shop at 6th and Howard, with views of outdoor art.

Catty-corner across the intersection is the building with furniture which seems to be stopped in the middle of falling out of windows--actual furniture, actually attached to the building.

The first floor of the furniture fall building has much graffiti on the street level.

Straight across 6th from the Subway is the changing display of focussed, very good graffiti art on the side of the 1 a.m. Gallery. Each usually unified artwork on that wall stays a good little while, is replaced for a short while by shiny black paint, and then the shiny black is replaced by new graffiti art.

All of which would be something to look at while eating at Subway.

Depending on which way you walk to or from this corner, things can get crimey. Alertness is good. Coming along Howard is more common-sense like that coming up from 6th and Market, two blocks away, sometimes called the most crimed intersection in the city.

2012-01-10T17:47:00.000-08:00

Another day. The sky gives light. The Earth gives green. Same old manna.

2012-01-10T16:42:00.001-08:00

Two white horse heads, side by side, slightly turned toward each other, made out of paper by someone who knows how to crimp and how to plan crimping, are looking our of a downtown display window with colorful scarves tossed casually around their necks.

Many display windows these days say, "Retail for Lease." Many others say, "Sale." It is fine to see the tradition continue where artists currently working for stores offer routinized urban passersby surprise.

2012-01-10T16:41:00.001-08:00

You can get reviving fresh air from inside yourself by taking a new route when you walk around your brain.

2012-01-10T16:37:00.000-08:00

There could be a musical where the micro-organisms making dirt that grows good food could sing, along with the humans.

The lovers, above, sing, "Oh, joy, us!" and the little rotters beneath their feet making healthy soil below out of old plants sing, "They couldn't live without us. We joy life, too."

2012-01-09T11:14:00.000-08:00

Do what is needed in a straight line, quietly.

2012-01-07T12:13:00.001-08:00

While on planet, look at stuff.

While on planet, smell.

While on planet, feel how different planet parts feel.

The Earth is tasty in many different ways. Let it know that it can speak to you, if it wants, in ways you haven't heard before or heard of.

2012-01-07T12:04:00.000-08:00

Lightly, gently, softly, standing on the sidewalk, he's playing the accordion--an accordion doodle from the heart.

2012-01-07T12:03:00.001-08:00

God is okay, working within bizarre self-created constraints stylishly.

2012-01-04T10:08:00.000-08:00

She doesn't mind how smart I am.

She doesn't mind the direction of my smarts.

She seems to kind of like all that which makes it easier for me to let my head be and not hold onto it so tight.

2012-01-03T11:59:00.001-08:00

If a cross street crosses a street in a good mood, the cross street mellows out some.

2012-01-01T16:10:00.000-08:00

2011-12-31T13:40:00.000-08:00

Dragging myself back to something I didn't like because I'm not ready for something new even if it's better.

Echew that.

2011-12-30T15:15:00.000-08:00

There's going to be some artificial snow at the Civic Center to let kids see what that's like. Natural snow falls there every few decades. Enough snow to be at all deep, less frequentlythan that.

They seem to be practicing in preparation, because there has been snow on the lawn on either side of the main entrance to City Hall.

Some San Francisco kids and adults and dogs have seen snow because they've been other places. I was privileged to see a San Francisco dog who hadn't seen snow until he was being taken on probably his usual walk around the Civic Center.

He stood stock still on the snow where there was usually lawn. He slowly and carefully raised his right front paw and looked befuddled, in a clear and forthright dog way. He raised an lowered that one paw again and again and looked at any available humans--his owner, people passing--with a very big "Wha. . .?" vibe. He could have just walked off the snow back onto the sidewalk, but he kept raising and lowering his paw, awaiting explanation, or clarity, or something.

A wonderul drawn book is called "Feynmann," about Richard Feymann, important, influential, funny physicist. Not a graphic novel--a graphic autobiography, done in his voice from the many words he left behind.

I recognized some of the words from "Surely You Jest, Mister Feyman" and a couple of other of his books I've read, but some great stuff that wasn't at all widely available is there too.

He worked way out there in physics, and he really wanted people to understand, really, deeply. One thing not widely available before that's well done is a lecture he gave to non-scientists in New Zealand to explain what the work was that he won the Nobel Prize for.

A cab driver in the US told him he saw him on TV after he won the Noble, trying to explain. The cabbie said Feynman should have said, "If I could say it in three minutes, it wouldn't be worth a Nobel Prize."

But Feyman really wanted to be able to explain it, in a reasonable number of minutes, to non-specialists. He went to New Zealand to try to explain the Nobel work to some people in general, so if the lecture was a big flop, it would be a big flop that happened far away from his usual hangouts.

The "Feyman" book shows him giving the lecture, and, part of the time, telling the audience what they're thinking. Thought balloons coming out of audience members heads shows that is what they are thinking.

As he explains the theoretical work he and his two Nobel sharers did, the audience members are thinking "This is too weird." "Why?" "It doesn't make sense."

Feyman is telling them scientists who found the theory are thinking the same kind of thing. Who knows why? Right, it doesn't match common sense, and it is true anyway.

He is saying that scientists have some of the same resistence to modern physics that the audience members do hearing about.

What he is saying, most of all in the lecture is, "Don't leave."

Don't walk away from this because it's uncomfortable and odd. Stay because it's true.

I haven't struggled much with taking in Feyman et al.'s Theory of Everything Else, as he sometimes called it. I also haven't left.

I appreciate him identifying the process. It's not just that some of the truest and most important physics is hard to understand.

It's that to the extent that one can understand it, it's viscerally hard to take in. One wants to go somewhere else.

Something I've struggled with more, so far, that with Feyman's work, is the idea that you can know how fast a subatomic particle is going, or where it is, but not both.

Learning in detail how they got to know that is very uncomfortable. I thank Feyman and this book that brought forth the New Zealand speech for helping me learn to notice the difference between being uncomfortable because I don't understand and being uncomfortable because I have started to understand and really, really don't like what I'm understanding.

Feeling that difference will help me, like the dog, not leave, but put my paw down again and feel if I can feel what's with reality better with this paw drop.

My size makes me local and limited in what I can easily understand as true.

Me and the "what is snow?" dog and amoebas and viruses are so much bigger than sub-atomic particles that how much bigger we are is part of what I really can't understand in the way I can understand what happens up here where balls bounce and can be followed.

I'm reeling in confusion far above what I've made of.

2011-12-27T18:17:00.000-08:00

The answer is inside rhythm, inside the rhythm we can move through. I don't know what that rhythm is. I've got to be still and let it engulf me in its time

2011-12-27T18:16:00.000-08:00

That's what I didn't think of when I was searching. That I had it all the time.

The movie "The Wizard of Oz" is worth a jillion just for that reminder--you had it all the time.

2011-12-19T14:07:00.000-08:00

Pop2012 at Oracle Arena, the basketball arena in Oakland, will happen March 31, 2012. Tickets went on sale December 1, 1011. Many shiny cards were out about it in mid-November. Looks, on the cards, like a rave, but the hours are less than a classic rave--7 pm to 2 am.

All the shiny cards say along with pix and date and time, "Be smart+Be aware+Your body is a temple."

That's sounds more sincere and a little more likely to work than the tag on commercials--"Drink responsibly." It would be a fine thing to have something as skilled and appealing as a commercial to show what drink responsibly would look like.

The "Your body is a temple" words don't have instructions, but seem like that might evoke in some people a touch of slightly wiser behavior. "Drink responsibly," as presented sounds very "We had to say this, we said it."

2011-12-19T14:06:00.000-08:00

Make the bad thing be a little less true by how I act today.

2011-12-15T18:25:00.000-08:00

Peter Berger is a sociologist. In his intellectual autobiography, "Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist," he tells of a Christmas when he was four or five.

His parents gave him an elaborate model train set. When he ran over to it, he did not turn it on. Instead, he lay flat on his belly next to the train and talked to the passengers.

Knowing what the gift is for for you.

2011-12-13T11:36:00.001-08:00

More comic books about more things can mean greater accuracy. Where Nelson Mandela grew up, it was not built up, and it was very beautiful. As "Nelson Mandela: The Authorized Comic Book" makes clear.

A book written only and not drawn might have said that he grew up in a area that was, like much of South Africa, gorgeous, but it only would have said it once. In the authorized comic book, his early life events happen, and there's beauty and beauty again always in the background til it's time go to cities that are less beautiful.

2011-12-12T12:50:00.000-08:00

Grace grows slow. Grace grows fast. Grace knows how to grow from here to the needed there.

The needed there and the dreamed-of there are not always the same place, grace knows. A reason to vary the grace grows pace is so we can grow to like what we need and see it when we get there.

2011-12-12T12:49:00.000-08:00

The European Renaissance as a way of thinking--we're still in it, except the Renaissance gushed beauty, and we don't.

2011-12-11T15:48:00.000-08:00

Wjat December demands of us may be different than what we demand of December.

2011-12-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

In his preface to his comic novel "Joseph Andrews," Henry Fielding writes of comic writing, burlesque writing, and serious writing.

In burlesque writing, the writer exaggerates some part of a character or situation to make it completely unrealisitic, an amusing monster.

The comic writer, in contrast, must, more than any other kind of writer, be true to reality "since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable, but life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous."

2011-12-11T15:41:00.001-08:00

It didn't work out the way I had dreaded, so I didn't have an excuse to lose my temper. I was kind of disappointed.

2011-12-11T15:36:00.000-08:00

Instead of violence, persistence, to say "We mean it" in a way less mean.

2011-12-06T11:06:00.000-08:00

Montesquieu is amazingly merry to read, in his "The Spirit of the Laws."

I think it's because he was doing his life work, writing this book, after tons and years of research, and doing it well.

Montesquieu, for a person living inside the USA political system, is a jolly, smart grandpa. He's the balance of powers guy, the fellow who thought much and wrote clearly about how different parts of government could check and balance each other, and people in general could have liberty because of government containing itself from within.

"The Spirit of the Laws" was published in the mid-1750's. The US Constitution was made in the late 1780's. Monstesquieu's writing, which is wondrous easy to read for what it is, was in fact read by and influential on the constitution makers of here.

I think one reason he was having fun is that he really accepted human nature. He didn't expect human nature to change.

But he'd studied republics of history and thought that focus on checks and balances could improve the republic form. It would use people's drive for power for their team as a way of containing the drive for power of other government teams, and having it be so government could get it work done but not squash people.

The way balance of powers was written in the US Constitution and plays out on a daily basis wasn't was he envisioned it in detail, and in some ways, in general. But his ideas about what balance of powers was for, the spirit of it, in fact, lives on in daily basis in sober governemnt offices that are contained by other government offices from going to far.

I think it's fun to read Montesquieu not just because of his vast historic importance--credit where credit is due--but because he was so happy about dealing with the way actual humans are and happily sure that a way could be worked out the work with what humans actually are and get a good result--a better result, in fact, than had ever existed before.

It's like an antedote to utopian thinking, which can be dangerous, to read him. We humans, as is, can do much better if we think wisely and design our rules well.

2011-12-02T13:26:00.000-08:00

Things can be heard which do not speak, such as plants and objects.

2011-12-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

I want to send you a golden "and" and also a golden "AND."

Big. Tall. Not solid gold, because they're to climb on, and slide and play, and clown, and see new angles and angels.

2011-12-02T13:21:00.001-08:00

It would feel scary to say I'm happy, so I'll issue a statement saying I'm content.

It is funny that the word CONtent is about CONtent, but the word conTENT is about process.

Lots of kinds of CONtent feels fine if the process is contentment.

2011-12-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

Pebbles under shallow water in sunlight look each like a new kind of jewel.

2011-11-22T15:29:00.000-08:00

When Teddy Roosevelt went to his first football game as a freshman at Harvard, in 1876,the spectators had to wait for the game to start while the two teams, Harvard and Yale, worked out the rules for this particular instance of football game.

When Teddy Roosevelt went to his first football game, US-style football didn't exist in a standardized form, but was being worked out, from rugby and soccervarious local opinions and customs. Harvard favored something soccerish; Yale liked more rugby style, meaning a player could pick up the ball and run with it.

For this particular game, they decided a touchdown would not create any score, but would create a scoring opportunity.

Now, in US-style football, a touchdown--when a player in the end zone has the ball by carrying it there or catching it there--scores six points and creates a scoring opportunity for one more point, if the team that made the touchdown successfully kicks the ball over the goalpost.

For this game, the one point post-touchdown kick was the only way to score, but you could only do it if you first made a touchdown.

This created low scores, reminiscent of scores now of non-US football, futball, soccer.

It also created ambiguity, as at the end of the1876 Harvard-Yale game. Very close to the end, Yale was ahead 1-0. Harvard made a touchdown and time ran out. Harvard said they should be allowed to go for the point attempt the touchdown allowed them. The ref said no, time was up, that was it. So Yale won 1-0 with no point attempt Harvard, and lots for these young scholars to discuss.

Now, and then, the way to get a touchdown was to have the ball legally in your possession in the correct end zone. Now, one way to do that, beloved and dramatic, is for a player to run into the end zone and catch a throw from the quarterback.

In 1876 and for a good while thereafter, that wasn't a possibility because a forward pass was illegal. The ball could only be thrown across, laterally, or back.

Wimpy liberals helped make the forward pass legal, as did Teddy Roosevelt, long after his student days, as presidents.

Progessives, liberals, those folks, my kind of people, said, as football became more and more prominent, that it was too violent. At this point, college football was what mattered, and broken leges and big gashes on youth were routine.

So some said football should be outlawed. Teddy Roosevelt was president andl iked football and thought the rules should be changed to make it somewhat less violent. He had no direct power over football rules, but one thing a president can do is make a lot of noise and strongly encourage people to talk to each other and come up with a new course of action.

.--facts from "The Big Scrum: How Teddy Roosevelt Saved Football" by John Miller.

2011-11-17T10:41:00.000-08:00

Yiddish theatre was a fairly big deal in the US and then died. Some of the reasons were heavily death related--all those Yiddish speakers and understanders killed by the Hitler gang in Europe.

But before that Yiddish theatre was hurting because in the early 1920's the US heavily restricted all immigration, so Yiddish speakers couldn't get in. Of course, a lot of those who couldn't get in were killed by Hitler, so the death of Yiddish theatre in the US is not so big.

However, the death of Yiddish theatre,though not big in mass atrocity context, is still something. It was unnecessary, which is important. It created moments to help people working really hard and living really poor, as new immigrant often do, to get through the next day and the next week.

And even without it's big problems, Yiddish theatre was hurting itself and reducing the quality of those helpful moments.

The union of Yiddish theatre actors successfully made it so producers couldn't hire young people to be in Yiddish plays. So producers had to hire 50-year-olds to play 20-year-olds. Which meant young people couldn't get work in Yiddish theatre. Which meant that the plays often looked ridiculous in their casting.

Which fed into another way Yiddish theatre hurt itself--it seemed more and more old-fashioned and out of it. If young people had been working in Yiddish theatre in numbers, they very likely would have brought it up to date, because that's what young artists do.

A good Yiddish theatre in the US with lots of young people working, and then thinking, "I could do better than this" and then trying to and sometimes succeeding--this is a twentieth century mythical creature.

What was missing was some quality and surprising moments for the tired workers in the audience--something better than the could imagine that was not presented. But that kind of surprise, art better than you thought of hoping for, closer to your life and heart than you thought possible--is a reason art exists, because it gives people a little more reason to exist.

So don't be petty and self-serving if you can help it. The missing moments from the last years of Yiddish theatre in the US, which would have been the last years anyway, because of large historyical awfulness, could have helped and changed people's hearts. And could have led, through artists seeing each other's art and getting ideas from it, to amazing saving moments that could be happening today, but don't, because the young people weren't riffing on what Yiddish theatre could be and the old people in the union, in terms of jobs for them, short term,won.

--facts from the book "The Yiddish Theatre in America" by David S. Lifson

2011-11-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

I don't have any wisdom about what's happening here, but I could improvise some stupidity. Or I could match my activity level to my insight level, and be still

2011-11-13T15:01:00.000-08:00

They are trying to slip me some of that gosh darn healing tea.

If I drink it, and it works, I might have to notice the world in general instead of just my crummy feelings, which are local, which I'm used to, and which are mine.

Out there, healed and whole, I could have my moods attacked by spates of beauty that come from God knows where and I don't.

2011-11-09T17:48:00.000-08:00

Handel was much more known for operas than oratorios when he was alive.

For a long time after he died, he was most known for one of his oratorios, "Messiah," and his operas were considered unperformable.

Now his operas are frequently performed, and "Messiah" continues to be a very popular Christmas season piece in the US and Lent and Easter piece elsewhere. By content, it is more Lent and Easter than Christmas. The "Hallelujah Chorus"--"and he shall reign for ever and ever" is about a period in Christ's life considerably post-birth.

Handel got into oratorios, which made his music performed a lot during the centuries when his operas were performed almost never, when the government in England banned opera performances during Lent--too frivolous, too not religious.

Handel started writing oratorios on religious subjects to be performed in theatres where opera was performed during Lent, so all the theatre workers from opera had work--singers, ticket takers, the lot.

Why did people think for a long time that Handel's operas, very popular couldn't be performed now?

Basically, because they were in the mood to think that, and for quite a while. The mood of impossibility was catching over a considerable period of time.

Impossible now because they had parts written for castrati--men castrated so they could sing high as adutls.

Impossible because they are mostly arias, which is to say solos, without ensembles singing, trios and duets which people are now used to.

Impossible because they demanded stages not like stages we have now.

Impossible because the plots were even more convoluted and unlikely than other plots opera goers of post-Handel times were used to.

Well, Xerxes, by Handel is part of the San Francisco Opera's 2011 season, and that is not unusual. The performance of Handel's operas has been going on for a bit.

You tell people the opera is aria heavy, and they accept that, especially is you get particularly awesome singers to be in the opera and sing all those operas.

You cast a counter tenor, a man who sings high, in the castrati part, that's one way.l

In the current SF production of Xerxes they take advantage of being in San Francisod, where people don't have cement walls around genders.

As writen by Handel, Xerxes, the part, is to be sung by a castrati, and the part of Xerxes brother is to be sung by a woman of fairly low voice--what's called a trousers part--a male part written for a woman.

However, in this production, Xerxes, written for a castrati, is sung by a fairly low voiced and famous and popular woman, Susan Graham and the brother, written for a woman is sung by a famous and popular counter tenor, David Daniels, a man.

The big stage question, stages used to be bigger or something, which was one reason given for the unperformabiliyt of Handel, doesn't seen to relate to this opera.

In a candid piece about building an opera season in an artistically and financially good way, a piece printed in the program for every opera of the season, the manager of the San Francisco Opera says a good thing about Xerxes is it has a small cast. He doesn't quite say that that helps him afford to get great singers in the fairly few roles, but it's implied.

A splendid time is had by all, including the audience. The main characters are brought out at the beginning and playfully introduced, helping people move lightly into the plot of a opera with a light tone.

There are different kinds of impossible. Handel's operas have moved from very popular in his lifetime to impossible to perform to a place where people who make opera think about how to make them work as well as possible.

2011-11-09T17:45:00.001-08:00

Making it real by paying attention to it. On its own, it isn't all that real.

2011-11-08T11:12:00.001-08:00

Peace me together, good old God. Help me get enough inner calm going that I won't make this situation that I'm in, that I don't like, worse by snarling at it.

2011-11-08T10:22:00.000-08:00

Surely if this were as beautiful as it seems to me to be, I would have been notified in advance.

2011-11-07T14:54:00.000-08:00

Maybe God started existing just a bit after the Big Bang and has been racing ever since to catch up and hasn't quite made it, so bad stuff happens.

2011-11-07T14:48:00.000-08:00

Many social gatherings large and small fill the first beginning of "War and Peace."

It's peace so far, and people are wondering if there will be war and sharing opinions about that. Whatever their opinion, they don't talk like war is something that could hurt or kill someone they know.

At one party, a young man in the infantry explains to people who aren't interested in his words but indulgent because he's young, enthusiastic and good-looking why being in the infantry is better that being in the cavalry.

First, it's cheaper to get in the infantry. Second, infantry officers get paid more than cavalry officers. Third, and most important, it's much easier for an infantry officer to be promoted to being a commander of a unit than a cavalry officer because infantry commanders are killed more frequently than cavalry commanders.

His reasoning stops there.

2011-11-07T14:47:00.000-08:00

How to be alive while alive

2011-11-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

I'm reading a science fiction book in which the author is more interested in the world than the plot. He keeps layering on interlocking details about the world, and the plot just sits there.

That works for me because I share his interest and disinterest.

Maybe I could live like that. Let the news plots and local-to-me plots go, and get amazed at the world right here, giving thanks on the planet of science fact.

2011-11-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

The golden light of late afternoons when days are getting shorter radiates nostalgia for itself.

2011-11-05T11:50:00.000-07:00

Circle. Circle. Rectangle. Tall, rectangular solid. A day in the city can be notice shapely.

2011-11-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

In October, the display window of the Goodwill Store at Mission and Van Ness had a costume and a costume suggestion: Dress as Little Red Riding Hood and wear a wolf mask.

2011-11-05T11:47:00.000-07:00

Sunrise today: black to deep blue to grey.

2011-11-05T11:46:00.001-07:00

Wet, juicy, alive, inconvenient.

2011-10-29T11:05:00.000-07:00

Plants in cities think better at night when there's less human talkiness.

2011-10-29T11:03:00.000-07:00

A weird way to be provincial is one time I heard there had been a big earthquake in Italy, and my first thought was, "That can't be. It's not on the Pacific Rim."

2011-10-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

It looks a mess, but I think it's all good and it's healing. I could pick at it, and make it look better to me for a moment, and slow the healing process.

2011-10-29T10:57:00.002-07:00

When it's time for the noon Tuesday party, we say, "It's time for the noon Tuesday party." Sometimes that's all there is to the party, that sentence. Other times there's more--two, three, four.

If a disaster happened, sometimes we'd remember dull moments with longing and affections. So we could just notice a dull moment and make that be the party of no disaster right here right now.

2011-10-29T10:57:00.001-07:00

There's so much beauty I'm embarassed. I don't know how to respond.

2011-10-29T10:56:00.000-07:00

Here comes the dark to show us.

2011-10-19T13:23:00.000-07:00

Title of novel: "Resurrection"

Author and translator: Leo Tolstoy, Vera Traill

First sentence: "No matter that men in the hundreds of thousands disfigured the land on which they swarmed, paved the ground with stones so no green thing could grow, filled the air with fumes of coal and gas, lopped back all trees, and drove away every animal and every bird: spring was still spring, even in the town."

A wise person whose name I can't remember said for a modern English-speaker reading 19th century Russian novels, the first hundred pages tend to be a confusing, difficult trudge. Then suddenly, around page 100, you find oneself swept away. The people who seemed like they had incomprehensible motives and too many names are suddenly a center of your own life, as important, at least, as your own current activities.

Tolstoy makes special demands on the reader. Once you're inside him, inside his power, he's demanding of you what he demands of himself: What about everything? What does everything mean, and how can it be healed?

Looking at the ground of the city and finding hope anyway somehow goes with the more famous scene in "War and Peace" where Andrei looks at the sky after he has fallen in battle and finds meaning, somehow, convincingly, that Tolstoy conveys almost psychically to the reader, using the cover of words.

2011-10-17T16:45:00.000-07:00

Sometimes the two-year-old can grow up and say no with really big words.

Two and three and four are ages to pick up language and culture without analyzing and memorizing, sopping it up. Sometimes the world changes, much later, and that kid, allegedly grown up, meets people who were absorbing some different assumptions at two, three, four.

The adult feels uncomfortable. The inner two-year-old may feel betrayed. "I learned it a different way when I could learn without conscious effort, and now the situation wants me to learn something basic and new. Foo. No!"

But the uncomfortable adult doesn't have to talk like that. We've got all these big, fancy words to say that the situation or people who are making us be uncomfortable because they are different than the scene we learned to fit into at two are really, basically, fundamentally wrong. So we don't have to learn big new things, or explore the vastness of our unknowing or difficult but things like that.

2011-10-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

I thought I'd be closer to being omniscient by now. There's a lot going on.

2011-10-17T16:43:00.000-07:00

Shake and wait.

It doesn't need to be made. It needs to be loosened, slowly.

2011-10-17T16:42:00.000-07:00

Science fiction. San Francisco. Ess eff. Things could be different. And sometimes they already are.

2011-10-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

--"We have to go uphill to get to the hill?"

--street voice, one bicyclist to another

2011-09-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

As Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, God said, "The land outside Eden isn't Eden, but it's wonderful in its own way, so don't turn any of it into the nothingish, scary space beneath freeway overpasses, okay?"

2011-09-26T13:59:00.000-07:00

"The rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air" are words frequently sung around here.

Explosive entrances are much sought for and often achieved, where people in general weren't aware of X and then X is suddenly all over everywhere.

Also available to be aimed for and sometimes achieved are subtle and pervasive effects. Slowly, things become different. Slowly, we get used to the difference. Slowly, we get good at the difference.

2011-09-26T13:37:00.000-07:00

In honor of our good friend, Life on Earth, today we are making nothing but moments, today we are using nothing but time.

2011-09-26T13:36:00.000-07:00

We don't look like we planned to look when it rains. The struggle of the little animal against the big environment shows more.

2011-09-26T13:35:00.001-07:00

The Eiffel Tower and bicycles as we use them come from about the same time in history and have a similar look of spindly beauty.

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889. Safety bicycles, the name of bikes with equal sized tires that everyone could ride as they replaced big wheel little wheel bikes mostly ridden by daring young men, took over between 1880 and 1890.

I can see the beauty of the shape of bikes best on sunny days looking at the shape shadows of parked bikes on the sidewalk.

2011-09-25T14:21:00.001-07:00

The dog is pretty, a Scottie profile on the sidewalk with long, carefully brushed hair which is grey and improves the greys of the sidewalk and of the parking meter it's leashed to, alertly fully extending the leash but not straining on it, focused intently on the glass door of the small clothes store.

The mother and daughter are pretty, just inside the clothes store's door, mother in her late twenties, kneeling at the level of the daughter and the dog.

The daughter seems about as young as she could be and still make sense of the clothes store experience. She looks to be liking touching the textured fabric of a dress and being touched lightly on her shoulder by her mom.

The heart looks pretty, spray painted red on the outside wall of the store, under the big windows that look into the store, right above where the wall touches the sidewalk. The heart is dripping red from its heart shape which seems like not injury but a spreading desire to include everyone in.

2011-09-22T12:07:00.000-07:00

The cynic has a shorter to-do list than the optimist.

2011-09-22T12:06:00.000-07:00

Looking for a new meaning in life in the morning, before people get set in there ways again.

2011-09-22T12:03:00.002-07:00

The official story. The unofficial stories.

One problem with paying a lot of attention to the official story is you get in the habit of thinking there's one story.

Then, if you dump the official story, you look for one other story to be true, instead of diving into the sea of consciousnesses.

2011-09-22T12:03:00.001-07:00

You might want to be alive later.

2011-09-07T14:03:00.000-07:00

Petroleum invisibles many things as I go past them so fast I can't see them.

2011-09-07T13:59:00.001-07:00

Does the cruel oaf in the group get to lead?

2011-09-04T10:28:00.000-07:00

I'm reading "Humphry Clinker," a 1771 novel in letters I hadn't heard of before finding it in a free box. I don't know much about it--I think it's one of those where everyone is quirky, which can have a certain charm or can seem self-indulgent, on the part of the author, and quaint-phoney. I have good hopes.

I could read the intro, but I like to dive in and see what I learn when I hear the author directly, without having been told what to think and what tone to think in.

One thing I know, after a few pages, is that if I write down and look up all the words I don't know, I'll be words ahead by the time I'm finished.

I think some of them are probably out of use and only to be found in the Oxford English Dictionary. Some are foreign, probably mostly French. I don't know if the OED will help me with the French. If the French is as old and obscure as some of the English words, I'll need to find another reference book to look it up in.

I'm sixty pages into my paperback "Humphry Clinker." Almost everyone is quirky, and it works.

The only important character who isn't quirky is the ingenue, Lydia, the young woman in love with the apparently inappropriate young man.

She has only enough characteristics to fulfill her plot part. She is dewy-eyed about the guy, dutiful toward her uncle, who is her guardian and wants her to give up the guy, and torn between those feelings.

Dewy-eyed, dutiful, torn--that's it. No hobbies. No hints of anything else going on inside. A human being has to flatten herself a lot to appear to be that kind of woman.

Her uncle, Mr. Bramble, on the other hand, is a treasure trove of characteristics.

He runs most of his varying characteristics through anger.

He moves into a hotel in the resort town of Bath. Someone else staying there has musicians playing. He doesn't like that they are playing music. He goes and hits the musicians with his cane.

The person taking care of business for him while he travels writes and wants to prosecute a poacher and evict a tenant not paying his rent.

Mr. Bramble blows up. He writes angrily how can you throw someone out of where they live just because they are having money problems? Probably the poacher shouldn't poach, but he and Bramble have known each other and long time and putting the law on him is something Bramble will not do.

So Bramble can be angrily attacking or angrily generous.

It would be wild to think of a young woman of that time or now expressing everything she has to express angrily. Bramble's niece Lydia doesn't come within a continent of thinking of it.

This is one of the unusual novels of its time that actually mentions that not-white people exist. The musicians Bramble hits are not white, African background. A mulatto woman is mentioned in passing, which is more mention than non-whites get in many 18thand 19th century novels.

Such mentions when they happen are a mixed blessing. The accuracy is nice--not white people have been in Britain a long time. But the way they are mentioned is likely to be a drag.

Bramble hit some black guys, at a time when slavery was legal and black people were often hit. Bramble declared himself ready to hit their presumably white employer, but in fact, he didn't find him, didn't hit him and moved to another place in Bath. It seems likely that him expressing his ever present, ever expressed rage by hitting was related to these musicians being not white.

And maybe the author set it up like that to show Mr. Bramble at his worst on somebody with whom he could believably get away with it.

Lydia, though shallow, has Grand Canyon depth compared to the black musicians, who are black and musicians and that's it. It would be a big promotion for one of them to have love life problems, and it's a promotion they don't get.

The author, having invented Lydia shallow is uninterested in her. The set-up in her letters to her school friend is that she'll write regular letters to her through the post and find someone to take secret letters, about her love life frustration, to the friend directly.

But all that disappears for long swathes of the novel where all the other letter writers write multiple letters and Lydia writes none.

The author invented a boring character and is bored. Sort of the problem for woman in many times and places--people with power invented ways women were pressured to be which were boring, and the people in power were bored with women to the extent that the went along with it--and nasty when they didn't.

Also the Lydia in love plot is a potential through plot. A fun thing about the author of the book is he is little interested in through plot. The characters are traveling together and writing people who aren't traveling with them. The author likes small to medium sized events along the way, not a love plot unfolding, again.

He actually seems to have foreshadowed a solution for the love plot, with the inappropriate beloved, who is working as an actor, saying he is really a gentleman, and will appear as a gentleman and it will all be okay. But he keeps not appearing, either for reasons to be announced later in the book, or because the author doesn't care about this plot, or both.

I'm not really complaining, because love plots about wimpy women are often boring, even if one has a larger, historical understanding of why being wimpy was a strategy for real women that was workable and sometimes required.

This book was published in 1771, and the Declaration of Independence was published in 1776. I keep trying to find some relationship there.

The guy the novel is named after, Humphry Clinker, is the lowest status person with a speaking part. So it's something about the value of the lowly.

The Bramble household picked him up with Bramble ill-natured sister who is traveling with him, mistreated a servant to the point that he was so mouthy back to her he got fired.

Bramble noticed Clinker, poor, in desperate straits, nearby, and hired him, Bramble acting in a typically soft-hearted, in spite of his often ill-natured self-presentation.

Clinker is a good ad for lowly people in general. Lots of skills. Sort of weird, but lots of skills.

When they are traveling, the coach they are in turns over and needs both carpentry repair and metal repair--blacksmith work. Clinker can do and does do both.

The way Clinker does the blacksmith work is Bramble finds a smithy near the site of the wreck, but the smithy isn't there and the forge is all fired up and ready to go.

The author has fun creating what he needs in a time when people didn't give coincidence in books a hard time. The means of being a blacksmith and the absence of a blacksmith gives Clinker his chance to fix the messed up metal. He's already fixed the wood.

So is the message that the poor are awash in saving skills. I don't know.

A thing that the Declaration and the book, especially Mr. Bramble's letters, have in common, is really enjoying using language. Luxuriating in saying what there is to be said is present in both documents, with different topics and levels of seriousness.

I think sometimes as a language evolves through group improv a point is reached where isn't noticably different, and to some people alive then, more fun to play with. So they go for it. Elizabethan England was like that--Shakespeare and a bit later the King James Bible imply a lot of people talking grandly and to the point at the same time.

The 1770's in English might have been like that.

Which fact is used for humorous purpose. In his first letters in the book, Mr. Bramble uses his big vocabulary and love of wording it up to complain about his health. Maybe it's gout, he writes, or maybe, he writes, fearfully and hopefully, it's much worse.

2011-09-03T10:27:00.000-07:00

It was the word "grafitti" as grafitti that alerted me, slowly, to the duel at Sixth and Howard.

I noticed on a wall there the word "grafitti" really big, all caps. It was sort of in pointy grafitti letters style, only much more legible. They wanted to be perfectly clear.

It was dated and momented in April, 2011. It said something like April 11, 2011, 1:32 a.m.

The moment was about three days before I first noticed. I went that way two weeks after I first noticed, and it was gone, completely obliterated by shiny black paint. It wasn't like where people paint out grafitti and leave a grafitti shaped blotch. The whole wall was painted black and painted well.

This keeps happening. Someone keeps putting up skilled grafitti on that wall, interesting and never the same twice, and someone else keeps doing an excellent job of painting it out.

Last time I noticed, some the grafitti was playing with the black background. White mysterious figures of power were painted on the black. A human skull with some fur on it. A tentacled figure with a friendly or maybe ominous grin.The work had a title, "Dark Matter."

Further down the wall, letters said "The Art of Grafitti." Really large letters. One of the f's extended from almost touching the sidewalk to my shoulder. They were three-D looking letters like used to be used for epic Hollywood movies, letters that look like they are built like the Egyptian pyramids.

I would expect that's probably painted out by now.

This is all happening on the side of an art gallery.

I miss a lot of installments because I don't go right there very often. To me, 6th and Howard and around there combines crummy, in some directions, and boring, in other directions, in ways that don't draw me.

But that wall is neither crummy nor boring. It is high quality grafitti and high quality painting out of grafitti.

If you go to look at it, and it's in its dark phase, right across Howard is lots of pretty good grafitti that doesn't go away so frequently and totally. It also isn't of such consistently high quality, though it may be done by the same people.

And of course, if it's business hours, you could go into the art gallery, which doesn't feature grafitti.

2011-09-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

The people who started the invention of English didn't speak English when they were growing up.

I like to take my ears for a walk here where I can hear many people speaking English who grew up speaking English and many people speaking English who didn't grow up speaking English.

Even a slightly different word order, that's clear, unusual and something I'd never think of can sound like a door opening to many small freedoms from routine. Tomorrow doesn't have to be like yesterday. Invention is present.

There is to hear also on the ear walk the music of humility and possibility--people obviously making all kinds of sense to each other in languages I don't understand. There are many ways to live. There is much that I don't know.

In medieval times, the two main languages of the area now France were called the language of yes and the language of yes. They were named after their different ways of saying yes, langue d'oc (southern) and langue d'oil (northern and the eventual overall winner, as "oil" changed to the standard French "oui."

Kids of a certain age are made of saying yes to the language they are immersed in.

I was on a Muni bus once when eight French people came on the bus and were a huge hit with a kid sitting on his mother's lap who was just at that age of absorbing the language and culture around him so he could be the language and culture around him.

French is heard less in San Francisco than English and Spanish and Chinese languages, less than Tagalog/Philipino and Russian. This kid might not have heard French before.

He was riveted by the French people speaking and being French. He stared at their mouth talking, their hands gesturing, everything about them. Can I be this one, too? I've never seen this one, and I love it.

In 1066 and 1067 and so on, many people in England who hadn't heard French before heard lots of French.

Some of the kids might have been able to hear it as an amazing trick or a new song, but the adults in England, speaking the form of German they grew up speaking, would be incline against delight. The French speakers were there because the German speakers had lost an invasion.

They lost the Battle of Hastings right on the coast facing France. They lost a few uprising later, and the French speakers were in England to stay.

The people who had lived in England their whole lives could feel however they felt about the new guys and the French speakers could feel however they felt about dealing with many people who spoke no French.

Regardless of feelings, the time would arrive when Norman French speakers (speaking a form of langue d'oc) and Anglo-Saxon German speakers would need to do something specific together--build a barn, fill a barn, make love.

Telepathy and gestures and getting to know an individual's person style can go a long way, but eventually, the ruler and the ruled learned a few words of each other's language.

When they had known a few words for a while and put words from each language, words maybe played with and simplified, right next to each other and the word combinations worked and made sense to other people from both languages, they had started the invention of English.

2011-09-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

The part of the novel "Moby Dick" that sticks with me and pops into my mind uninvited has nothing to do with Captain Ahab and his crazed quest to kill the huge, even for a whale, whale that hurt him.

It's the part where some of the crew are in the water surrounded by acres of whales, whales as far as the eye can see, an unimaginable number of whales right there before them and around them.

The men are debating whether there will ever be a lot fewer whales than that, whether humans can make any dent, or a serious dent, in the numbers.

They agree that no, there are too many whales for humans to really reduce the numbers, and they go back to working at what was well-paying work, compared to similar work in other sea jobs, for everyone whaling. The author seems to agree.

I'll be reading the newspaper, or looking at trash flying in the air, and suddenly I'm with all those guys; I see all those whales and feel the whalers' confidence.

2011-09-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

Kimberley Patton teaches at Harvard Divinity School--comparative religion, among other things. She noticed a dangerous idea that is common to many religious traditions--the idea that the ocean can wash away bad stuff and then the bad stuff is gone and no longer exists.

Her book on this is called "The Sea Can Wash Away All Evils: Modern Marine Pollution and the Ancient Cathartic Ocean."

2011-09-01T10:18:00.000-07:00

--"The kid's a sponge. He said, 'Daddy, why did you walk on the red? You said we weren't supposed to.' So I stopped. I can't jaywalk. I can't jay anything."

--sidewalk voice, man to woman.

2011-08-29T13:48:00.002-07:00

Water, like people, sometimes travels by air and sometimes by land. Water travels below the surface of the Earth more than people do.

2011-08-29T13:48:00.001-07:00

The inconspicuous blesser sits off to the side.

2011-08-29T13:45:00.000-07:00

The colors of the outside of the white bakery bag on a sunny day include pale blue, light gleaming yellow, grey and a little white.

2011-08-29T13:42:00.000-07:00

Kid crying to his mom in the open doorway of their house, August morning: "I wanna go with Jonah!"

Mom--"Jonah's going to school."

Kid--"I'll be good. I'll be good."

Mom--"You are good."

2011-08-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I've read Antigone before by Sophocles. This time something is obvious that hasn't been before.

Antigone is daughter of the gone, exiled king Oedipus, yes, that Oedipus. His marrying his mother all unknown to himself is why he's gone, and also killing his (he didn't know it was) his father.

That's all unusual, but more usual is the two sons fighting over who gets to be king now. The younger one wins the getting the residents and elite to like him campaign. Then the older brother attacks the city with seven friends and their armies (seven against Thebes) and the older brother loses again.

The old guy relative who ends up being king, Creon, decrees that the winner brother, defender of the city, will get full honors at his funeral, and the losing brother won't have a funeral and won't be buried, but left for the vultures to feast on.

Antigone, the sister of both these men, defies the king's order and covers the older brother's body with dirt--a symbolic burial that might help some with the carrion bird problem. Creon orders her death.

Creon's son is her fiance--small world and they keep marrying close. He says to dad, good thinking, I obey, but I hear in the streets people muttering that it's wrong to kill a sister for just wanting to marry her brother.

This point in the play is when I thought the thought I hadn't thought before. Obviously, everyone in town, or a lot of them, who thinks his body deserves respect regardless of the late fighting, because we're all humans and worthy of respect, all those people should throw dirt on the older brother's body.

You can't stop us all, they should say with that action, rather than just muttering in the street.

The reason that thought came automatically is I'm reading Antigone during Arab Spring going into Summer, during a series of often amazingly non-violent uprising against long-time tyrants.

Of course, you do it as a group. Antigone asked her sister to join her and her sister said she wasn't strong enough to stand against the state.

So not being able to get two, Antigone did it as one.

I just read a biography of Sandy Koufax, a very good pitcher, who was on the same baseball team, the Dodgers, as Don Drysdale, a very good pitcher. One year, before players as a group had any rights, back when they were stuck on the same team forever if the team wanted them, those two players held out and didn't sign contracts, together.

Ultimately, Drysdale, who had a family (Koufax didn't yet) caved.

The man who ultimately organized the players' union said that was very helpfull in organizing, which he was starting to to right then. He said if the two best pitcher can't. . .

Together, in a group, the odds increase in our favor.

2011-08-10T10:46:00.000-07:00

A carving or a weaving where the heart is whole sent as a thank-you note to you.

2011-08-03T16:43:00.000-07:00

A USA person strides onto the scene, studies the situation for seconds on end, applies USA categories, and knows what to do.

2011-08-03T16:42:00.000-07:00

Grey skies above, gentle colors below.

2011-08-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Vera Stark takes a year off from her law firm when her second child is born. It has been twelve years since the birth of her first child.

She loses herself in the child's learning and caring for the child and generally being domestic. She doesn't pay much attention to the news. Some things get through. She notices the news story about a child the age of her baby getting shot dead while carried on her mother's back.

A seed is planted. She tells her husband, suddenly, from his point-of-view, "I'm not going back to the firm. . . .I don't want to fight their insurance claims on their jewelry and Mercedes. Or dig the dirt in their divorces."

Her husband wonders if she'll go out on her own. He doesn't understand, at first, the nature of the seed of change.

She goes to work for a foundation that deals with land use issues. Which means things like people getting thrown out of where they've been living by the government, taken to a blank bit of land in the middle of nowhere, given by the government metal sheets to build houses with, or given nothng, and being told to make their homes.

The foundation fights that and the many things like that. Vera, with experience, reminds others she works with that they can't fight causes, only effects They can't change the white minority rule setup. They can only find loopholes and delaying tactics that make things less bad for some people sometimes.

"She went to work for the Foundation, not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong."

Later, things change. It's the part where majority rule is seen as inevitable but hasn't happened yet. Stark is invited to be part of the committee to write a draft constitution.

She isn't sure she wants that. The foundation needs her as a leader and as a lawyer. There's a heavy volume of work as some white people try to get away with a lot before the change of government. It's not what she's used to--much less concrete.

But it is her invitation to move from effects to causes. A draft constitution will be changed. Not all final constitutions have real power.

But being part of writing a draft constitution for a real ongoing country is doing something that might have power for a long time. Those wrangles about the exact phrasing of this or that might change lives as much as her fighting evictions.

And she brings something few whites on the side of majority rule have--lots of experience being in the kinds of home most people in the country live in. Grounding.

A friend of hers also active in making the new, working in finance, says she's got to take it. You've got to do the best you can and trust everybody else working for your goals, and trust the future. So she becomes all committe meetings all the time, the best she can do at that moment.

--about and quoting from Nadine Gordimer's novel "None to Accompany Me." To the extent that the novel is about private life, it's about marriage. That's a grown-up title for a novel about marriage.

2011-07-26T10:46:00.000-07:00

--"It has a couple of comedians in it that don't suck, but they don't have the power to overwhelm the suckiness of the movie."

--Sidewalk voice, man to man

2011-07-26T10:31:00.000-07:00

Lina Wertmuller, film director, said of Fredrico Fellini, film director, "He's like a man running along in a black hat and a black coat and he has a box in his hands and in it is a secret. Every once in a while he stops and seems to show it to you, then goes on running."

I read that quote and thought that is how I felt at the end of seeing Fellini's "Juliet of the Spirits." It made me angry. What did all that intensity add up to? I thought we had a deal that he would let me see clearly and for as long as I wanted into the black box by the end of the movie.

That wasn't his job. He was one to take the confusion built into life and transform it into beauty and wondering and wonder.

The one thing I knew about "Juliet of the Spirits" right after I saw it was that the colors were beautiful. Countless technical reasons for that, and Fellini used all the technique because he cared about and loved every instant of color in that movie.

What he didn't care about was a viewer being able to contain the experience as if putting a period at the end of a sentence.

--Lina Wertmuller was quoted by Donald Sutherland, who worked with Fellini as the lead in "Casanova," in an essay by Mary Blume in her book, "A French Affair," a collection of essays she wrote for the "International Herald Tribune."